What’s the best way of digesting student teaching evaluations?
This is a difficult question to answer, even for an experienced teacher. Student evaluations can be very helpful and give you a good sense of what is working and what isn’t, and also perhaps what to do about it. But it can be quite upsetting to receive negative feedback especially if it is flippant or personal, as some of it is.
For these reasons, when we received the student evaluations for our first year compulsory political theory module, I emailed my teaching assistants (all PhD students or recent graduates) with some advice.
I am sure there’s lots more good advice I missed out and perhaps there are things that I say here are mistaken. If so I’d be delighted to be further informed about how best to react to feedback and how I might better advise my TAs in particular. But thinking it might have some useful guidance for others, I post a slightly altered version of the email below.